Her middle-grade novel, DANI NOIR, was reissued for a YA audience under the title FADE OUT. The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us. Nova Ren Suma is the author of the YA novels THE WALLS AROUND US as well as the YA novels IMAGINARY GIRLS and 17 & GONE, which were both named 2014 Outstanding Books for the College Bound by YALSA. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did. The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in? It could be that nothing was waiting for us.

Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder.

Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. My middle name, Ren, means lotus flower in Japanese. My first name, Nova, is said to mean chases butterflies in The New Age Baby Name Book where my mom found it, but I’m pretty partial to the galactic definition myself. This is something utterly new, a book that is kinetic and beautiful and unexpectedly life-affirming. People often ask what it means or where it came from. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Nova Ren Suma, author of IMAGINARY GIRLS and 17 & GONE With high intelligence and a massiveness of heart, Warga gifts us with a novel that has the music of Mozart, the logic of advanced physics, and the vision to see the link between them. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out.

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma